The Bad Mother's Handbook (15 page)

But then I thought, it could still be wrong, the test. It
only said 98% accurate. That meant two in every hundred
weren’t
. So, say they sold, I don’t know, five hundred a
week nationwide, somewhere in Britain ten women
would be shitting themselves for nothing. And one of
them might be me. After all, I had had a period, so that proved it. It was probably OK after all. I’d sneak one of
my mum’s water tablets when I got home, see if I could
shift some of this pot belly. Because, at the end of the day,
I was me, Me, and there was no way I could be pregnant.
Encouraged, I began to hunt in my pocket for the instruction
leaflet.

‘I think,’ said Daniel cautiously, ‘your next step is
probably to get checked out at the doctor’s. You might
need to act quite quickly, depending . . .’ He trailed off.

I think I went a bit mental.

‘What the FUCK is it to do with YOU?’ I gave him
a shove and he nearly toppled. His glasses fell off and
landed in the wet grass, and that made me hate him even
more. ‘It’s MY body! MY problem! You have NO idea
about ANYTHING. Just, just,’ my arms were waving
pointlessly, ‘get out of my HEAD!’ As Daniel tried to wipe
his spattered lenses on his sleeve I struggled up, clutching
the white plastic stick with its parallel lines of doom. ‘And
you can FUCK OFF too!’ I told it, ramming it into the soil
like a tent peg and stamping it down. I turned and stalked
off, towards the wobbly kid.

‘I don’t know why you’re so cross with
me
,’ I heard
Daniel call, then mutter, ‘I’m not the one who got you
pregnant.’

I broke into a run.

*

T
HE TRAINS IN
my head came back again last night.
Details change, but the dream’s recurring in its basic plot:
I’m trying to go somewhere (although the exact destination’s
always pretty vague) but the train I’m on never gets there. There’s always some crisis; I’m on the wrong train,
or it won’t leave the station, or it turns into a wheelbarrow.
Sometimes it never comes at all. I wake with a terrible
sense of panic, and loss.

Not hard to interpret that particular sequence of
symbols, any cod-psychologist could work it out. I
wonder, though, if I ever got my life together, would the
trains actually Get There, or would the dreams simply
stop?

Sometimes in the morning, before I get up, I lie for a
few seconds and my heart’s strung out with nostalgia for
something I can’t even identify.

I got to school at 9.10 that Monday, even though I’m
not technically paid till half-past: I wanted a clear field.
It was eerily quiet. Everyone was in assembly (except for
Sylv who’s let off the daily spiritual injection to man the
phones). I tiptoed past the main office, turned the corner
and trotted quickly down the long corridor. That morning’s
hymn floated out to greet me.

‘The trivial round, the common task
Should furnish all we ought to ask’

sang the children flatly, northernly. And yes, when I
peeped through the double doors Mr Fairbrother was
standing at the front, hymn book aloft, a trumpet and a
traffic cone at his feet (he likes his visual aids, does Mr F.
‘I hear and I forget, I see and I remember,’ he’s always
quoting at us). So I had about five minutes. I hurried back
up to the reception area, peered round the corner, All Clear,
and scuttled across to Mr F’s office.

Once inside I dumped the carrier bag containing the cagoule on his chair where he couldn’t miss it. I’d wondered
about a note with it, but what do you say? ‘Sorry I
puked on your shoes’? My eyes travelled round the room
for a moment. Shelves of box files and books, union memos
and selected children’s art-work displayed on a pinboard;
on the floor by the far wall a giant ammonite, an inflatable
hammer, a monkey puppet, a hamster cage, a devil mask
(as I said, he does like his props); in the corner a box of
confiscated footballs, cap guns, poking devices, etc. On
his desk was his parents’ wedding photo and a selection of
horrible ornaments bought for him by various kids over
the years. It was the room of a kind man. Oh how, how,
how I had messed up.

Time to go. I listened at the door, then opened it
slowly.

‘Everything all right?’ Sylv’s voice made me jump
about a mile in the air. She was standing across the corridor,
lipsticked coffee cup in hand, waiting for me. ‘He’s in
assembly. But you know that.’

I could have told her. I could have beckoned her into
the office, closed the door and taken her through the whole
sad story, she’d have loved that. Sworn her to secrecy (a
slim chance but a chance nevertheless). But I couldn’t do it.
I said, ‘I was just checking Lost Property,’ and she stared at
me so hard her eyebrows nearly disappeared into her hairline.
‘Oh, piss off, you poisonous old witch,’ I nearly said.
Nearly.

The morning seemed to last forever. By ten I was sitting
in the quiet corner with the remedial group helping them
fill in worksheets on Area. We’d all drawn round our
hands and agreed that mine was the biggest, and I was trying to count away the recollections of Sunday with
square centimetres.

‘How old are you, Miss?’ asked Dale. They do that,
remedials, constantly try to distract you with personal
chat.

‘That’s rude,’ said Lisa promptly. ‘You shouldn’t ask a
lady that.’

‘I think she’s about twenty-five,’ persisted Dale. He
had a long face with a large jaw, and chewed his pencils
compulsively.

‘No,’ I smiled. ‘I’m afraid I’m a bit older than that.’

‘Fifty?’ offered Lisa. ‘You’ve a look of my gran, and
she’s just had her fiftieth birthday.’

‘When’s your birthday, Miss?’ asked Dale, spitting
splinters of mashed-up wood across the table.

‘Mine’s next week,’ said fat Philip, waking up. ‘I’m
gettin’ a Furby.’

‘You big poof,’ said Dale. ‘You big girl.’

The groups moved round and I helped put up some
backing paper for a display on Transport. Mr F’s disappointed
face and Sylv’s peevish one were printed on
every sheet of sugar paper. Each time I pulled the trigger
on the staple gun it felt like I was driving staples into my
own temples. Finally I asked Pauline if I could go and get
a paracetamol.

‘Then go and sit in the staff room,’ she said. ‘There’s
only ten minutes to break, I’ll clear up here.’ I must have
looked really poorly.

Sylv’s the guardian of the paracetamol unfortunately
but, hooray, she wasn’t in the office so I unlocked the
cabinet and helped myself, swigging them down with a mug of cold water. From there I went straight to the
staff room where I heard through the half-open door:
‘. . .
saw them embracing in the car park of the Feathers,
apparently’
. So I did a smart U-turn and walked back
along the corridor, and met Mr F coming in the opposite
direction.

‘Thanks for the, ahm, bag, ah . . .’ he said as he drew
near.

‘Oh, no bother. Thanks.’ I couldn’t look him in the eye.
Keep walking, I told him silently. He did, and I pushed out
through the swing doors into the playground and breathed
again. My whole body felt hot and I knew my cheeks were
burning. Maybe it was the menopause, come early. That’d
be just about my luck.

The bell went and children began to trickle out. I
walked across the rec over the patches of slush and
perched with the edge of my bottom on the low wall by the
gates, wishing I had a coffee. ‘Hey, Miss?’ Dale appeared
at my elbow. There were tiny flecks of red paint all over
his lips off the crayon he’d been eating. ‘Look! I did you
a card. For your birthday. You can save it, like, and bring
it out when it’s time.’ He handed me a folded piece of
centimetre-squared paper with two pencil figures drawn
on the front. One was lying down in what appeared to be
a pool of blood. ‘It’s OK, he’s a baddie,’ explained Dale,
pointing. ‘The other’s Gravekeeper, he saves the world.’
He spread his arms out like wings, then let them flop to his
sides.

‘Nice trick if you can do it,’ I said, opening the card up.
To a grat teasher
, it said.
Meny happy retuns
. You’re not
supposed to touch the pupils, the times being what they are, but I leant forward and gave him a hug. On these
slender shafts of sunlight sanity seems to turn, at times.
‘You’ve made my day,’ I told him warmly. He stepped back
slightly. ‘No, really. You’ve redeemed the moment, you’ve
given me the impetus to lurch forward into the next
inevitable crisis. You’ve provided a tiny spark of light in
a tunnel of gloom. Dale, you are a superhero within your
own galaxy.’

‘Steady on, Miss,’ he said.

*

I waited a week
and did another test, also positive, so
that was that. Then I sorted all my clothes out and ended
up with a capsule wardrobe of fleeces and baggy jumpers
and tube skirts and leggings. Standing naked before the
mirror now there was no doubt. My whole body had
started to change. It wasn’t mine any more. It belonged to
the thing inside.

At school I avoided Daniel, avoided everyone, really.
Spent a lot of time in the library, books open, looking out
the window. Well, how could I join in the common-room
chit-chat about clothes, and boys, and weight, and fallouts?
In the smart corner it was all Tony Blair and his
New Vision, but I couldn’t engage with any of it. The
very word
Labour
turned my insides to water. None of it
seemed real; it was as if there was a big glass wall between
me and the others. I’d realized in the park, nothing was
going to be the same ever again, but it was taking time for
the extent of it to sink in. I mean, I couldn’t see further
than the pregnancy. There was the immediate problem of
trying not to look fat, and (more hazily) steeling myself up for the hoo-ha when everyone found out, not least my
mother, who was definitely going to have some kind of
breakdown. On the very far horizon was the prospect
of giving birth, which I’d heard was quite painful, and
I wasn’t very good with pain. But after that? I knew there
was going to be a baby at the end of it, but I couldn’t get
my head round it. Not
me
, not a
baby
.

Unless I decided there wasn’t. But, as Daniel, damn
him, had pointed out, I was going to have to get my skates
on if I wanted to go down that route. I didn’t even know
what they did. Hoovered you out, a girl had once told me.
It didn’t sound too awful in that respect, but even I could
see there was probably more to it than a quick trip to the
Outpatients’.

I think it was the toes that were bothering me. We’d
had a video on pregnancy, in Year 10. It showed the
foetus wiggling about, sucking its thumb and kicking its
skinny legs with their little splayed toes, then the narrator
had said,
See if you can guess how old this baby is
. The
teacher had paused the tape and we’d had a go, most
of us thought about five months. Then she switched the
video back on and the answer had been fourteen weeks.
See how the heart, with its four chambers, is already beating
,
the narrator had continued.
In fact, a heart beat can
be detected at just six weeks of development
. The miracle
of creation. It was a sod.

So what a mature and sensible person would have
been doing at this stage of the game was weighing things
up, the fucked-up life versus the other, differently fucked-up
life, and seeing which she thought she could honestly
cope with. What a mature person would do was tell their mother, see a doctor, get a counsellor. Face up to it all, and
pronto.

But I was frozen. Because it still couldn’t be true; it
couldn’t be me who was going through this. I was going
to slide the pregnancy under the lining paper of the chest
of drawers in the spare room of my mind. Something
would turn up, surely.

*

H
E CAME STRIDING
across the tarmac, kids buzzing round
him like flies.

‘Here,’ he said. ‘No sugar.’ I took the steaming mug
off him and studied the ground while he scanned the
sky above my head. ‘Don’t worry about Sunday, anyway.
These things happen. I was once very ill after a rogue
sausage roll from a garage.’ He nodded at my bare forearms;
my coat was still in the staff room. ‘Don’t catch cold,
will you?’

He walked away, and was immediately accosted by
a very small Year 1 boy, tugging at his trouser leg and
pointing over to the football pitch. Mr F bent down to hear
the tale and it was like a scene from
Goodbye Mr Chips
,
except that Mr F looks more like Syd Little than Robert
Donat.

I’d give them breaktime to get it out of their system,
then I was going back inside.

*

I was having
a conversation with Daniel in my bedroom.
He wasn’t actually there, I’d just conjured him up for the
purposes of rational debate.

‘I know you
want
to see Paul again. But all I’m asking
is, have you thought through the reasons behind it?’
Daniel sat scrunched up in the beanbag chair, his knees
to his chin. I was at the desk, doodling boxes and clouds
on the flyleaf of
Sense and Sensibility
.

‘He’s got a right to know,’ I said sulkily. I wanted to
see Paul so much it was like toothache; I couldn’t keep
still, couldn’t get comfortable. Today was Sunday, which
always makes things worse. There’s something about
Sundays which makes you rattle around inside yourself,
even in these exciting days of car boot sales and extended
trading hours. Mum had gone to Do-It-All to get some
polystyrene coving and Nan was downstairs playing
dominoes with Ivy. I’d paced up and down my room so
much I had a stitch in my groin; I thought I was going
to go mad with indecision. Hence Daniel.

‘He will know, sooner or later. You can’t keep it a
secret much longer. Unless you . . .’

‘Yes, all right,’ I said testily. ‘I know the score.’